Without the willingness to rebel, entrepreneurs might never find those competitive edges.
Pressure To Conform
Since there is a competitive edge to rebellion, why is there so much pressure in business to conform with management orthodoxy?
Well, for one thing, not all new ideas are better ideas. Some people aren’t comfortable going out on a limb in the first place, while others find it to be a dead end. After all, rebellions are more likely to fail than to succeed.
Even when a rebellious start-up succeeds, there are pressures to conform. The sheer challenge of growing an organization may require some elements of formal management. One of the biggest frustrations for successful entrepreneurs is hiring. When the demands of the business become such that the entrepreneur finds he or she can’t do it all, recruiting people with similar creativity, decision-making instincts, and work ethic can prove incredibly difficult.
Besides, what the organization needs in order to grow might not be to replicate the founder’s skills, but rather to add complementary skills. However, just defining an appropriate complementary role and measuring achievement in that role requires some organizational discipline. The more hires the organization makes, the more need there is for such formalities.
Additional pressure towards conformity may come from outside investors. This might be a necessary evil for the sake of achieving the scale required for success, but it does create a source of formal accountability for the entrepreneur. Investors love the idea of innovation from the standpoint of opportunity, but they also tend to demand formalities such as a detailed business plan and performance metrics when it comes to knowing how their money is being spent.
The bottom line is that it is one thing to manage a small start-up on instinct, but a larger organization tends to require more formal management in order to keep operating efficiently. Ironically, decades after Thomas Edison, one of the original successful business rebels, Jack Welch, helped run General Electric and became one of the gurus of formal management discipline. While that might be a particularly extreme contrast in styles, some evolution of that nature may be inevitable when a company grows to the extent that GE did.
Write Your Own Textbook
Of course, most successful companies are somewhere between the extremes of a start-up and a mega-company like GE. For such organizations, is there a workable middle ground between rebellion and management orthodoxy? The true value of studying business as an educational discipline might be to learn to think of management broadly as a process rooted in the unique characteristics of a venture, rather than narrowly as a routine which mimics what other companies are doing.